Why don’t I remember being born, or even in the womb?
You do. But you did not possess a language at the time, so those memories did not have a “narrator’s voice” identifying what was going on in verbal terms, and therefore no linear continuity. When you try to remember “back and farther back and then before that” your memories trail off at some point in your early childhood usually right around language acquisition.
When you remember things before that, you don’t know what it is that you are remembering. Nothing is identified for you within your own memory. You don’t recall what you were thinking at the time because you were not thinking in verbal terms.
Because the parts of your brain associated with memory don’t start to mature until you need them – around two to four years after you’re born.
Every animal is capable of memory and they have no language skills (or extremely limited ones.) Profoundly retarded humans without language skills are capable of memory.
There is no evidence that people form memories in utero.
Many people have memories from an earlier age. I can remember things that happened before I was 1 year old.
Seriously unlikely. You probably remember things that were told to you later about what happened when you were younger than one year old. Children below the age of around four to six are often not capable of distinguishing their own memories from what is external to them – this is why false memories in early childhood are so common.
I did not say that one needs language in order to remember things. The first words of my post above, in fact, are “you do”.
What I said was that you do not know what it is that you are remembering when you remember things from before you were verbal.
That is probably true of my dog as well; she probably remembers things from many years ago, but doesn’t have a good solid cognition of what, exactly, it is that she is remembering.
I don’t even mean to assert that without language it is IMPOSSIBLE to identify and make sense of your memories (even though my wording was kind of towards the absolute); but rather that it is difficult. Without recall of thoughts (rendered in words) that went along with sensations and emotions, you just get a constellation of sensations and emotions. And except for very recent memories there will be lots of missing chunks and distortions in both of those — usually just brief little “snapshots”, in fact. When and where was THAT? Who knows? Some place somewhen, when there were these colors and this sound and I felt this way.
EDIT: oh and re: lack of evidence for memories in utero — perhaps we don’t form them. Not sure how conscious we are in utero, it’s kind of dark and warm and conducive to drowsing, I suspect. But we don’t have any evidence to say we CAN’T form memories then, either, do we?
Just a remark which, I think, supports AHunter3’s perspective —
I have a feeling which occurs sometimes, that I realized well into adulthood was probably a memory, probably of my birth.
The feeling involves a feeling of vastness, like being the whole of the universe; and then a feeling of immense compression, leaving me finally feeling incredibly tiny. It was years before I could even find words to put to this feeling – it was more a physical sensation, or rather a recollection of a physical sensation.
I am really interested in aphasia, I had always assumed that no words = no thoughts pretty much, but I know now that that’s not it at all. It is a very strange sensation to think without words, outside of them. But that is the state in which many of our fundamental assumptions about ourselves and our world are formed. I believe we should always keep this in mind when we’re around babies, and be mindful of the unspoken messages we may be sending them.
Nonsense. I have distinct (if fragmentary) memories of laying in a crib staring up at a mobile, eating baby food (red good, green bad), being in a walker stuck in the grass, and several other memories that had to have been experienced prior to 18 months. I have very clear memories of the daycare I was in for a few months at age four including meals served and the playground equipment, the house I lived in, and can still remember the names and bus stops of children I was in kindergarten with at age five.
That is not to say that forming false memories or conflating genuine memories with things later heard is at all unusual, but it is quite possible for very young children to form memories. It is clear that even infants form persistent memories of people and places that the repeatedly recognize. The problem comes in that memories are not stored in a linear fashion; they are linked together by sensations, ideas, or concepts that may not be logically related, and without the broad context that one forms via experience, early childhood memories will become disjointed and without hook. Even if a child formed a memory of being in the womb or passing through the birth canal, there would be no context for understanding the inputs, and thus no way to recall any distinct memory of sensation.
Stranger
Ahunter3: Got a cite for that model of memory? What kind of evidence would even back that up?
Wiki on “Infantile Amnesia”.
My friend’s kid asked me this once. I told her I didn’t remember being born because I was very young at the time.
That shut her up.
No. I have one particular memory from a place we lived in until I was about 1 year old, and never returned to. It was a fairly mundane thing that nobody would have mentioned to me afterwards, but would be fascinating to a small child. Many years later I mentioned this to my mother and aunt, and they both verified that I was describing something real.
And I have quite a few distinct memories prior to the ridiculous age of “five or six.”
Edited thread title for clarity.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
We learn to define our world by the physical senses and our concept of language and patterns of thinking develop around that, when we are in the womb we are pretty much in a sensory deprivation ‘tank’, and probably a good thing as there does not seem much to do in the womb in a physical sense, but whatever we experience would not really coenside with our physical world outside the womb and have no direct relationship to our physical model of the world. Perhaps very weird dreams we have might be some indication of what we experience outside our physical world.
This sounds like something that I’ve experienced – and this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever heard anyone else describe anything like it. But it doesn’t seem like a memory to me, just a sensation… more specifically, some sort of glitch in my kinesthesia. It is extremely hard to describe – sort of like space has been inverted, so that I can touch my thumb and forefinger together and it feels like there are millions of miles between them, but at the same time, everything is microscopically tiny. It never happened very often, but was more common when I was younger (i.e., from childhood into my early adult years). It seemed to be more likely to happen when I had a fever, or occasionally when I would lie down with my head tilted back. It would be interesting at first, but gradually get more intense and unpleasant… but I could usually get rid of it quickly just by opening my eyes and sitting up. I would like to know if this sounds like what you’re talking about, and also if this sounds at all familiar to anyone else.
I can’t find the cite for this, sorry.
A researcher in child development I worked with many years ago explained that for memory to be accessible, one need at least two frames of reference (sight and language, smell and hearing, etc)
My own earliest memory is one of vision and taste. Never eat a ladybug.
I have an extremely clear memory of lying on the kitchen table lookng at the light while my diaper is being changed. I described the red wallpaper with the chickens on it to my mother once and she remarked “We moved from there when you were about 18 months old.”
The memory is very clear and vivid, but not of an incident anyone would described to me.
On the basis of a movie I saw recently you may be a cyborg?
While it sounds extremely far fetched, I remember realizing I could remember things with that memory. A sense of being aware of my surroundings enough to store them in my brain and think of them later.
I can still see that red wallpaper with the chickens on it.